


your future veils its face

by tortoiseshells



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Battle Stress & Soldier's Heart, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Gen, Period-Typical Ableism, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Pre-Season 1, Recreational Drug Use, creative mistranslation of Shiloh, gen-adjacent? maybe?, is Silas Bullen his own warning yet?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 23:13:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15784083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoiseshells/pseuds/tortoiseshells
Summary: Sunday, May 4th, 1862. The new nurse will arrive tomorrow.Or, eighteen different glimpses of what the main cast is worrying about, hoping for, just prior to Season 1.





	your future veils its face

**i. alfred summers**

If Summers is a weighty man – and he surely will admit he is – it is not with the heavy responsibility that has been dropped in his lap. The Mansion House he has borne like every other assignment the Army has pushed his way: as a barn cat, a squash patch, a stove of coals. A thing which he does not, strictly speaking, tend, so much as sit amiably by, and dole out such attention as needed.

And yet, the news itches. Dix has stolen a march on him, the termagant, and is sending him a Baroness. A Baroness! Some hatchet-faced Teutonic widow, no doubt, about to descend on his hospital like one of Heine’s Valkyries. Summers reaches for the bottle, and does not look forward to the morning.

 

**ii. james green**

_Shiloh_ is the talk of their diminished parish, _Shiloh_ is the chatter of the Federals quartered under his roof, _Shiloh_ has been tucked in the crevices of every polite (and impolite) conversation. James Green knows now the word means “peace”, and is alive to the irony that it has brought him anything but.

He reviews ever paper for news. The Greens have no people, know no people with poor Johnston, but his interest remains, and he considers it, and the Confederacy, and his family, as he rolls brandy around a fat-bellied glass. Johnston dead, Beauregard forced back in Tennessee. The Federal’s Young Napoleon laboriously moving up the peninsula to Richmond. His faith in the Confederacy is true – and yet he wonders, doubt creeping like the evening shadows, if this Oath is so unconscionable, if it isn’t best for Jane and the children. A man must have his principles – but what are those to his family? He finishes his brandy, and anticipates another restless night.

 

**iii. bridget brannan**

The high and the mighty of the hospital may be fretting about the arrival of the Duchess, or Baroness, or whatever kind of fine lady she be, but Matron Brannan has no time for that balderdash. Oh, to be sure, she’s laughed. The image of satin and hoopskirts cleaning out weeping wounds is a fine joke, and the Irish above all love humor in times of sorrow.

But she has no more than a quick chuckle, for there are ledgers that need balancing and boys that need burying, the endless war to wage against vermin, rodent and otherwise. Bridget Brannan will see, soon, whether the Baroness be a hothouse bloom or a steady light in the storm. For, Father Maguire reminded his flock only hours before, is there anything hidden that shall not be known?

 

**iv. jane green**

Jane Green has set aside the problem of tomorrow’s scanty breakfast with her embroidery frame, and turns her mind to other things. The war, of course, cannot be ignored. It is a thing beyond her power, though, and it is not the war itself that worries her equanimity, but her children. Dutiful Emma has grown restless without word from the youngest Stringfellow boy; Alice, hardly out before war had been declared, has no one to charm and her own beau, Tom Fairfax, has not been heard from in months. There is nothing for her girls here but the lewd stares of her Yankee houseguests. 

Jimmy gives her pause. When Beauregard had fired on the Federals a year before, she’d thanked God desperately for Jimmy’s lamed leg, that awful thing, the disappointment that was her fault and her son’s cross to bear. He could not enlist, would not leave. But he is young, and young men will be foolish, and every day he threatens to go where she cannot protect him. If his pride were not so constantly insulted, if he wasn’t smarting under the heel of Federal occupation – 

_No_ , Jane Green tells herself, _Alexandria is no place for my children_. 

 

**v. aurelia johnson**

Fourteen months. Fourteen months, nine days. The time unspools behind her like a thread from an old shawl, and it’s tying her to her Gabriel. He’s out of sight, behind. Carolina’s so far, and she hardly knows the way, only that she found it once, and she will find it again. Follow the long thread of days and take what’s hers, take her boy to freedom.

All this time, she’s worked as hard and then again as she did in the wide cotton fields, but she has her wages, and she is free. Tomorrow brings more work. Tomorrow adds another day. Fourteen months, ten days. She has freed herself, and her Gabriel will be, must be free. 

 

**vi. jimmy green**

The damned Yankee officers under his Father’s roof think the Green family traitors, but Jimmy Green knows that isn’t so. If there is any traitor, any treachery, in this house, it is in his bones and in his hand. He came into the world wrong, leg crumpled like discarded foolscap. His reflection taunts him, but not so much as when his father reads news from the War, beaming at the brave conduct of Southern men. He should be with them, with Frank Stringfellow and George Henderson and Tom Fairfax, and all his schoolfellows who’ve left books and boyhood pranks behind. 

He’s been to see Dr. Mitchell, who looks at him dubiously. _I should be fighting_ , Jimmy Green said to him, _I’m no boy, and I should be fighting_. And he’d set aside his cane and he’d walked, to prove it. _Please, Doc. Tell me I can go_. For all of this, Jimmy Green returns to his Father’s house with only the faintest of promises, and a command to return again after Mitchell has had time to consider. It’s not enough, but it’s what he has. He glares at the cane and tells himself that he must go.

 

**vii. anne hastings**

_Anne_ , Byron says quietly, equal parts confounded and loving, and yet Anne takes no comfort in it. How can she? Dorothea Dix is sending a new nurse – perhaps _a head nurse_ – and now she, who stood at the gates of Hell in Scutari, who has managed the Mansion House Hospital with all the knowledge and sure-handedness of Miss Nightingale herself, will be challenged, subordinated, and ignored once more. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. Her own little world, sent to the shoddy mill to be ripped and re-ordered into something infinitely inferior.

She’s had her fill of gin and shouting for the day, and yet the anger is still there, humming like a belt in a factory or the wheels of a great locomotive. Anne Hastings, up from a nameless alley in East London, is not accustomed to fairness or justice, but their absence can still sting, still wound.

 

**viii. belinda gibson**

Where Belinda Gibson has gotten in life, she’s gotten by her own good sense – good sense to know what the world expects from her, and especially to know to keep herself to herself. She’s been owned since birth, and, Lord, she knows it. Her body and her time put gold in Mr. Gibson’s purse and now Mr. Green’s, and no matter how merciful they fancy themselves, they aren’t much fond of being reminded she’s got a soul, same as them. But she has got one, and a mind. She knows to keep that apart, like something precious hidden in a petticoat pocket, and only takes them out when they can’t be seen, won’t hurt her.

Now’s as good a time as any, Miz Emma and Miz Alice unbuttoned and brushed, the whole house asleep. Belinda can close her door, and sit, and so she does. She misses her long-gone brother, and lets herself feel it, if only in this small moment. She prays for George, for the strength to carry on through another week, for real freedom – how long she’s waited! – to come. She knows folks like her are free in Alexandria, and though she hasn’t felt it yet, it’s a sliver of hope, a candle in the night. There’ll come a change, she thinks, she knows, and soon.

 

**ix. samuel diggs**

People like him – with skin like his – aren’t supposed to want, to strive, to have ambition. But, thinks Samuel Diggs, how can he not? How can any – born free or in chains – not? So little is allotted to them, to him. Yet the world is wide, and he knows, within himself, there is a vastness that, since Dr. Berenson, is almost never recognized, almost never nurtured except accidentally, the roadside flowers watered out of the slosh of buckets carried by.

There’s little justice in it, but justice is as rare as a Christmas orange even to him, a black man born free. He would not be patient with this world, and yet he must be. Mansion House may not be a torrent, but it is a small and steady stream, and what he practices here, what he learns, will help him. And what he earns by his labor, what he sees over Summers’ shoulder in the rancid operating rooms, will help others. Unconsciously, his hand goes to his pocket, where the necklace for Aurelia lies, and he looks cautiously forward to what the next day might bring.

 

**x. jedediah foster**

He’s up to his elbows in blood, his head’s pounding from dealing with Hale’s damned officiousness, and his body’s crying out from exhaustion, for relief. It could be any of an infinite parade of days at Mansion House. In truth, Jedediah Foster cares as little to count time as he does to tally and describe his personal use of the syringe; if he recalls days, it is by procedures, and not names.

Readying the morphine, careful of his dose, he runs over the previous hours: endless rounds of pulse-checking and wound-inspecting, punctuated only by the extraction of a ball, lodged so perilously close to the heart that it quivered with the Corporal’s pulse, and the cutting and re-assembling of another unfortunate’s hand, ferociously burned and bumblingly bandaged, so that the fingers had begun to heal together. Somewhere in there – Hale’s irritating whistle, Nurse Hastings’ furious competence, Summers’ grumbling about Dix’s lieutenant, coming like a Greek Fury to hound him. The morphine takes a slow but sure hold, like a creeping vine, and a clock strikes the late hour in the hall. He’ll be home too late for Eliza, again.

 

**xi. alice green**

It’s late into the night, but a body wouldn’t know it from the way those blue-bellies carry on. Yankee men, ha! Alice can’t believe, won’t believe they’re men or gentlemen, not like her Tom. Good Confederate men are all gone away, gone to be heroes; half the Federals are here, under her father’s roof, with their nasal speech and their bottomless hunger. Poor Mama, constantly scraping together dinners from whatever the locusts leave her! And Papa and Jimmy as idle as the noon Sun in July! But what is there for her to do? To support, to serve her Cause?

Alice Green frets and tosses in her bed, feeling at once like a dynamo and a pinned butterfly, wishing for God to grant them Victory, for Tom Fairfax to come home.

 

**xii. silas bullen**

_You’re lording it up like a rat in his hole_ , that grey Irish harridan had told him once, come to look for the hospital’s gruel. But she’d accepted what was, and that was good. Silas Bullen has no intentions of changing his ways, for his life down below is a good one, and he is master of all he sees. He eats like a king, drinks like a lord, may bully and club any uppity negro he likes. What else is there for a man in this life?

_Not much_ , he thinks to himself, lifting fine Virginia tobacco from a recent parcel, addressed to _Wiliam Bell, Fedral Hospitle, Alexsandria_ , from – hmm ¬– _yore loving Anna_ ¬. He pockets it, and discards the note. This war has been a good to Silas Bullen, and he hopes to God it’ll go on a while longer.

 

**xiii. tom fairfax**

When his breath comes, gouting like lifeblood, it catches and claws in his mouth, his throat, his lungs. Blood thunders. Even here – alone – a stretcher in a wagon – the night – it’s all, everything, overwhelming. Dark hides the smoke. The rumble and sluice of his pulse in his ears holds back the cries. But it’s there, he knows.

George Henderson is sitting across from him. Tom Fairfax can’t see his face, but the slump of shoulders, the tilt of his head, and the high, piercing whistle all proclaims _it is George_. Tom shakes his head, something feeling loose and fragile within his skull. He lost George in the smoke, hadn’t he? But the whistle goes on, stopping only to laugh, as if to say, _Fairfax, don’t you remember?_ He won’t. He won’t. He doesn’t.

 

**xiv. henry hopkins**

Neither the war, nor the grim business of the Mansion House, observes the Sabbath. Chaplain Hopkins does. He does in the little chapel that was once a ladies’ parlor, and again, piecemeal, by the cots of the bed-ridden and the dying. It feels infinite, this progress from ward to ward and bed to bed, and the Word, he fears, is not. Yet he says to boys who are fearful of the next world, _God is there. His mercy is infinite._

Late in the night, Henry Hopkins kneels alone, fearing that his heart shall be waxen and that his strength shall falter. _God is there_. He prays for the salvation of the dead, the preservation of the sick and wounded, the end of slavery’s evil in the world. _God is there_ and he prays, prays hard, that they will not be forsaken.

 

**xv. frank stringfellow**

The heroes of his youth had been soldiers, and now Frank is, too: Captain Frank Stringfellow, 4th Virginia Cavalry, saber in hand, raised to defend, and a sweetheart pale as moonlight behind. How Emma had wept to see him go! And how bravely he had promised, _oh, Emma, I’ll be home soon_ , feeling as tall as Washington, as handsome as Lafayette, and the Cause twice as justified by God on high. As soon as the Yankees caught a whiff of Southern powder, saw Southern steel glittering against the battlefields’ green, the war would be over. _Oh, Emma, precious Emma_ , he’d whispered, against her lips, against her beautiful hair, glossy as a blackbird’s wing, _don’t you cry your pretty little eyes out over me_.

He’d been brave then, and brave now, and Frank Stringfellow tells himself _he is a soldier_ and this is the work than men were meant for. In the dim flicker of campfires, he reminds himself. But the stories of his boyhood remain, and they were devoid of mud, mosquitoes, and endless days skulking through green Virginia forests. Had Washington ever crept past a man in the dark, only to put a knife in his neck? He discards the thought with his pipe’s ashes, and sleeps through the night.

 

**xvi. byron hale**

The new nurse arrives tomorrow, and though Summers rumbles like Etna and Anne has gone silent with anger, Byron Hale remains unperturbed. It’s all the same. _Das is mir wurst_ , he could say, tripping along the words that old Doctor Vogel had said a decade ago, in Mexico. He’d died there, Byron faintly recalls, a fatal encounter with cholera his souvenir of Manifest Destiny.

Tomorrow, the sun will rise, Baroness von Olnhausen will arrive, Jedediah Foster will waste time and supplies, their poor dinner of thin gruel will be late, and Nan will take him to bed. There will be orderlies to order, wards to inspect, shattered limbs to amputate. War may be chaos, but that is outside. In their little world, little changes. All is in order, as the Army commands.

 

**xvii. emma green**

_Precious Emma_ , Frank inscribed his picture to her, but it’s Emma who’s left to treasure it. She holds it lightly, angled towards the dancing flame of her lamp, and her stern-faced beau, so upright and correct in the image, seems to slouch and smirk. There’s a gun in his hand and a promise on his lips, to _whip those Yanks_ and _come back, darlin Emma_. They were pretty words, and, oh! how handsome Captain Frank Stringfellow, 4th Virginia Cavalry, had been when he said them! 

But it has been months. Summer, autumn, winter, and now the spring is fading away into the long Virginia summer. The war has taken Frank away from her, but she has a creeping sense that it might have taken some other, still vital part of her, and left some absence, some unfamiliar thing in its stead. It troubles her. Emma Green leaves the carte de visite in a place of honor, on her dressing table, and turns down her lamp. If there is no word tomorrow, or the days after, then, she resolves, she will have to seek it herself.

 

**xviii. mary phinney**

So much has changed in the space of a year, and Mary Phinney sometimes feels dizzy with it – as though she is removed from herself, or trailing like a shimmering tail behind its comet. Now, listening to the night noises of noisesome Washington city, she feels quite still. Gustav is a year buried, and the knowledge that every day that passes carries her further from him no longer has the ferocious bite of a starving wolf. She has nursed her nephews through the bloody flux, has thrown herself into the abolitionist cause, and now, with Miss Dix’s dubious, portentous blessing, has another task and battle.

Mansion House will undoubtedly challenge and change her, though she is not sure precisely how. Mary Phinney knows herself, and knows the strength she possesses – a great dynamo lies within, well tested by life’s slings and arrows, directed by her iron-clad principles and her hard-won certainties. If she is not equal to the Hospital, she will make herself so, and so she waits, apprehensive but unafraid, to travel to Alexandria in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Herman Melville's "The Portent".
> 
> I know I'm a year late to the party, it's my first time taking these characters out for a spin, haven't written for any fandom in a while. I hope I've done these mostly-lovely characters justice!


End file.
